Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Are you a man or a mouse?

[...] What if the mice escaped the lab and began to proliferate? What might be the ecological consequences of mice who think like human beings, let loose in nature? Weissman says that he would keep a tight rein on the mice, and if they showed any signs of humanness he would kill them. [...]

With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years.

Their findings are certain to generate a renewed burst of speculation among scientists who study the history and evolution of life. Each period of abundant life and each mass extinction has itself covered at least a few million years -- and the trend of biodiversity has been rising steadily ever since the last mass extinction, when dinosaurs and millions of other life forms went extinct about 65 million years ago. [...]

The eruption of a super volcano "sooner or later" will chill the planet and threaten human civilization, British scientists warned Tuesday.

And now the bad news: There's not much anyone can do about it.

Several volcanoes around the world are capable of gigantic eruptions unlike anything witnessed in recorded history, based on geologic evidence of past events, the scientists said. Such eruptions would dwarf those of Mount St. Helens, Krakatoa, Pinatubo and anything else going back dozens of millennia.

"Super eruptions are up to hundreds of times larger than these," said Stephen Self of Britain's Open University.

"An area the size of North America can be devastated, and pronounced deterioration of global climate would be expected for a few years following the eruption," Self said. "They could result in the devastation of world agriculture, severe disruption of food supplies, and mass starvation. These effects could be sufficiently severe to threaten the fabric of civilization. [...]

[...] The last glacial period was preceded by 1000 years of the coldest temperatures of the Late Pleistocene, apparently caused by the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano. The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption may have decimated Modern Man's entire population. [...]

[...] Lembit is the leading voice in the UK on asteroids and the little matter of one of them smacking into us, probably sooner rather than later. And one of those bits of rock doesn’t have to be particularly large in order to cause immense devastation and loss of life. Or rather, let me put it this way. If on Christmas day last year I had told you that a giant wave would sweep across south East Asia, hit land and cause the loss of 220,000 lives (so far), you would not have believed me. There’s no argument – you wouldn’t have believed me. The next day it happened. [...]

SM: So there’s still a problem about being taken seriously?

LO: I think there is because there are contradictions in how the government approaches risk. They’re willing to impose all kinds of incredibly strict regulations on farming to try and eliminate miniscule health dangers but they stand by doing very little about a potentially Armageddon type impact which in actuarial terms stands to kill far more people than CJD, BSE, food poisoning and phosphates put together. Therefore it’s not joined up thinking about risk management, which is causing the problem. [...]

I’m absolutely sure there is going to be a significant impact at some point in the next few years. There just is.

SM: One frustrating thing is that NASA scientists are constantly being criticised for crying wolf.

LO: That’s true but I must be honest and say that it’s in our interests to have these claims that objects are coming close because it raises the ante. Sometimes these objects are leaving the Earth’s environment before we even spot them. There was one 300 metre object that actually travelled between the moon and the Earth. Now had that hit us that would have incinerated Asia or Europe. And that’s the problem. We’re living in a ten pin bowling alley where these things are the balls and we’re one of the pins.

So I don’t mind a little bit of sensationalism because frankly, no measure of media sensationalism would really prepare people for the calamity of an impact. J. Tate isn’t so keen on that, he thinks the sensationalism isn’t so good but, from a political point of view, it helps because it keeps the subject in front of the public. The politics of fear sent men to the moon. It’s a sad thing. I’d love there to be a positive dynamic here but frankly if it’s fear we have too use, so be it. [...]

PORTLAND, Ore. - Dozens of residents in the Pacific Northwest reported seeing a bright streak of light as it flashed across the sky, startling witnesses from southern Oregon to the Seattle area, according to officials. [...]

The Sun's shifting magnetic field is set to focus a decade-long storm of galactic dust grains towards the inner Solar System, including Earth.

The effect this will have on our planet - if any - is unknown. But some researchers have speculated that sustained periods of cosmic dust bombardment might be related to ice ages and even mass extinctions.

During the last decade, the magnetic field of the Sun acted like a shield, deflecting the electrically charged galactic dust away from the Solar System. However, the Sun's regular cycle of activity peaked in 2001.

As expected, its magnetic field then flipped over, so that south became north and vice-versa. In this configuration, rather than deflecting the galactic dust, the magnetic field should actually channel the dust inwards.[...]

[...] If anything, it is the risk of an ice age which we have to fear. When ice ages arrive, the geological record tells us, they arrive quickly, within the space of a few years. A repeat of the last ice age would see the ice caps extending to the Thames. England would become like Greenland: capable of supporting marginal settlements on its southernmost fringes, but a wasteland within.

What is more, the geological record shows that ice ages have tended to occur at 10,000-year intervals and are preceded by few warning signs. The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago.

For anyone reading this on a sun-lounger in Bournemouth, enjoy it while you can. For readers in Skegness, it may be too late already. Even the mass of hot air generated by the climate-change lobby will not prevent the next ice age when it does arrive. [...]

In covering the massive, tsunami-generating earthquake off the northwest coast of Sumatra this weekend, many news outlets picked up a statement from Enzo Boschi, head of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics, saying the temblor was strong enough to disturb the Earth's rotation. Can an earthquake really affect the way the planet spins on its axis?

Features of the Earth's rotation about its axis that may affect long-term climate change: (1) precession of the rotational axis and (2) change in the tiltedness of the axis, also called "obliquity"

Features of the Earth's revolution around the Sun (orbital parameters) that may affect long-term climate: (1) precession of perihelion, (2) cycle of eccentricity, and (3) varying orbital inclination [...]

Hazards to northwestern North America could be greater than previously thought

[...] The occurrence rate for great earthquakes on the Cascadia megathrust is approximately every 200 to 800 years. We are currently within the timeframe where another large earthquake is expected, with the last earthquake having occurred over 300 years ago [...]

Two Aon subsidiaries, Aon Re Global and Impact Forecasting, LLC, have released a report on 2004's natural catastrophes, describing "a year of freakish weather patterns, ending with the worst natural disaster in modern times: the December 26th tsunami." [...]

I am just getting started. But this is good enough as a representative sample of a few of the dangers that we face in the near future and in the now. It is like there is a giant reset button on earth, and it is about to be pressed. Any one of the above is enough to cause serious headaches and set backs. Personally, I think we may have to face a confluence of assaults, plus I am skipping a few of the dangers.

At this stage, we may need a bit more help than non-polluting, renewable energy resources. It should be obvious that we have multiple issues at work here, and our use of petrochemicals is only one part of the equation. Is it the end of the world like a Christian Fundie Armageddon? Probably not. Although, very likely it may be the end of the world as we know it.

I figure that those in power know about these things, and worse, and are keeping some of the data to themselves. Do I have smoking gun proof? Not necessarily, but I think we can get close enough for assigning probabilities well over zero. What do they plan on doing with this knowledge? Again, I think there may be enough knowledge out there to draw certain inferences...

All Peak Oil, All the Time part 2

I am attempting to place peak oil in context in this series. It is a huge task, and I find myself balking a bit at the enormity of it all. If my hypothesis is correct, then peak oil plays a part in nearly everything that is going on in the world right now.

We've got a lot going on.

Peak oil activists and I agree on this point, but we radically diverge on the exact reasons why. I will be breaking the topic into small chunks, partly to help me get my mind around it, and partly because very few want to read long articles in a blog.

For my hypothesis to make sense, I will just reveal it a bit at a time. Besides, as I continue to research I am open to changing it as new facts reveal themselves.

When I finally wrap it up, you can decide for yourself if I am close to the truth, or just off my rocker. I will even attempt to project into the future what we can expect to hear from this movement.

As an aside: I have not owned a car in seven years, preferring to use public transportation. Make of that what you will.

To summarize and clarify what I have covered so far: We have a conveniently leaked report that shows the government is very much concerned about peak oil. Historically, Those who have expressed concern regarding the imminent demise of our oil supplies have often been petroconsultants and the like.

At the same time they usually deny that burning petrochemicals is a contributor to global warming. It does not appear that most deny the existence of global warming, at least not that I have discovered. It is becoming more and more difficult to deny that climate change is taking place, with more alarming data surfacing almost every day. I do think that the use of petrochemicals a likely contributor, along with a number of other factors that contribute to the growing degradation of our environment.

We have people in the know about our imminent demise of oil supplies yet are still heavily invested in the oil industry itself; perhaps expecting to make a fortune as it is announced oil is now a scarce resource. This includes the Bush crime family.

New discoveries of vast reserves of petrochemicals are discussed in the peak oil subculture, yet quickly discounted. So for I have discovered : 1) There is not enough time to reach these reserves before the oil clock runs out; 2) still not significant enough discoveries to meet the growing demand; 3) we should ignore these reserves due to the horrible impact burning such fuels, or using them for fertilizer, has on our environment. Running out of petrochemicals is a good thing in the long run.

Perhaps I should not lump all peak oil activists, or believers, or what ever label they choose for themselves, together. But to move quickly through this topic I will have to make generalizations, and there does seem to be certain directions this movement is taking. Clarifications can be made later if I think necessary.

A prominent theme that runs throughout the peak oil narrative is to deliberately turn away from the 9/11 investigation. Ruppert, once seeming to show great promise as a 9/11 investigator, deemed that this great crime is no longer worthy of investigation since we will never discover the smoking gun. Instead we need to scare people into taking peak oil seriously. The fate of our planet depends on it, he says. He fears that his journalistic credentials will not be taken seriously if he brings up the fact that a plane did not crash into the Pentagon.

In recent months a few of the many web sites that challenge the official account of the events of 9/11/2001 have also attacked the idea of peak oil. I would prefer to ignore this controversy, and there are good reasons for doing so, as some of these web sites lack credibility on other counts; nevertheless, as these sites are magnets for large numbers of people who are just beginning to find their way out of the consensus societal trance, they appear to be doing some palpable harm. I have received at least a couple of dozen e-mails from sincere people wanting to know my response to claims that "peak oil" is a scam, and that oil is actually an inexhaustible resource.

Production at the oil field, deep in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, was supposed to have declined years ago. And for a while, it behaved like any normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island 330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989, production had slowed to about 4,000 barrels a day.

Then suddenly -- some say almost inexplicably -- Eugene Island's fortunes reversed. The field, operated by PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000 barrels a day, and probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400 million barrels from 60 million. Stranger still, scientists studying the field say the crude coming out of the pipe is of a geological age quite different from the oil that gushed 10 years ago. [...]

Heinberg never gets to those good reasons that I have yet discovered. Maybe I missed them.

That oil may be a renewable resource, rather than a fossil fuel is either quickly dismissed, or it does not matter anyway since using the stuff is harmful to our planet. There is enough evidence for me to assign a decent probability to the hypothesis that oil is not a fossil fuel. A trap that we all fall into is to assume that something is known for certain. All science ever does is assign probabilities, or at least that is what it should do. Scientists themselves are human beings, and are culpable of accepting something as dogma, or at least making public statements that are rather dogmatic.

Belief is the end of the search for truth, I think.

I find it interesting that part of the peak oil agenda is to diverge from the 9/11 investigation. (The word "agenda" often has negative connotations, but we all have agendas. I have an agenda in this series: to dispute the commonly held wisdom of the peak oil subculture. I do not intend for the word agenda to have a covertly negative connotation here. Nor do I intend for my use of the word "subculture" to have negative connotations.)

There seems to be a fear of tainting the peak oil message with 9/11. As if wanting to come to a complete understanding of such a huge crime, and the ensuing violence could be a taint. But, alas, it could, and I recognize this. The goal of the peak oil advocacy is to put this before the masses; gain a much larger audience.

Such a large audience is just not ready for the truth it has been decided, and I find this troubling and rather elitist. I refuse to make such a choice for others. I disagree with ignoring truth to gain this audience. And I find it suspiciously convenient for the Bush Crime family. As this series progresses, I will continue to look at how the peak oil agenda fits in nicely with the Bush crime agenda. Along the way, I will have to examine some high strangeness.

So far we have been told that the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were because of 9/11, even though we know now that this was never the case. Then the focus was weapons of mass destruction. The only weapons of mass destruction over there were used by the US. Now we have the incredible lies of spreading democracy and freedom. Soon, it may be time to "spread democracy" to Syria and Iran by attempting to destroy them. All lies.

It has even been publicly admitted that these wars are for Israel, but it is not talked about much since it would not be popular with the masses. It is quite obvious that the Bush regime is mobbed up with those whose allegiances are for Israel rather than the US.

Next on the roster of lies could easily be, "We went over there for the oil to save you. We failed and I'm sorry." I am not sure why we would believe this one, since everything else is a lie. Meanwhile millions have been murdered, tortured and mutilated. I won't have a warm fuzzy feeling that those people suffered for the off chance that I won't have to. But that will not be the truth. Not to mention, that the only freedom we will soon have left, is the freedom to starve.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

All Peak Oil, All the Time

I hadn't particularly planned on diving into the peak oil fray. But, I dashed off a post, where I could have been a bit more thoughtful, and it has even been alleged that I was doing a bit of axe grinding at Michael Ruppert's expense. Yeah, I guess I was.

I have little doubt that we will all be told that the oil is up, prepare to be really, really poor. The next declaration will probably be along the lines of, "Let's blame China!" (I have written about China bashing, and how I thought that might be a big set up)

"World oil peaking is going to happen," the report says. Only the "timing is uncertain". [...]

But in its conclusion the report makes troubling reading, noting that "the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary". [...]

Guess who is behind this little report that was "leaked":

The Annapolis Centre for Science-based Public Policy is a group which has received $658,000 in funding from Exxon Mobil since 1998. It openly disputes the idea that global warming is the result of burning fossil fuels.

[...] In fact the coalition that is pushing for a radical new energy policy is largely composed of those who stand to benefit from a revival, not a phase out, of oil and gas development. The intellectual and activist core of the coalition is made up of those veteran oil geologists and engineers who use the method of modeling the ratio of reserves to production developed by the maverick research geophysicist Marion King Hubbert, who died in 1989. He believed that the peak of production is reached when half of the estimated ultimately recoverable resource, determined by what has been discovered and logged cumulatively as actual reserves, has been pumped. In 1956 at the Shell Oil Lab in Houston, Hubbert startled his colleagues by predicting that the fossil fuel era would be over very quickly. He correctly predicted that US oil production would peak in the early 1970's. [...]

and:

"This much is known, Kenneth Deffeyes writes, "the loudest warnings about the predicted peak of world oil production came from Petroconsultants" (Deffeyes, 2001: p. 7).

In a late 1998 merger Petroconsultants became IHS Energy Group, a subsidiary of Information Handling Services Group (IHS Group), a diversified conglomerate owned by Holland America Investment Corp., IHS Group's immediate parent company, for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group (TBG, Inc.). In the 1920s George Herbert Walker and his son-in- law, Prescott Bush, had helped the Thyssen dynasty finance its acquisitions through Union Banking Corp. and Holland-American Trading Corp. [...]

Yes, we have the Bush family's freaky smirk all over this tale of woe:

Colin J. Campbell, the leader of the Neo-Hubbertians, is a petroleum geologist from Ballydehob, Ireland, and author of The Coming Oil Crisis (1997). He worked for Texaco as an exploration geologist and then at Amoco as chief geologist for Ecuador. He is a Trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC) and the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO), originally a network of 24 oil scientists. ASPO has Associate members like Halliburton and financial sponsors like Schlumberger, but Campbell is critical of the Bush-Cheney Administration for "collectively having personal investments of as much as $150 M in oil companies"

And we will probably have a Bush in the White House making the announcement that there is no more oil:

This is it folks. Those who figured, after this election, we would be rid of George W. Bush might want to think again. They are wrong: a third term can be had. The XXII Amendment is quite clear on this. George W. Bush has only been elected to the Presidency once. His first term he was appointed, not elected. And, during his first term, he was not sitting during part of some other President's term of office.

We have a mass murderer at the helm of the ship folks; he's here to stay; and he is going to announce we need to make cut backs because the oil is running dry. "There's nothing we can do, except let a lot of people starve. I'm sorry you are so poor. We tried to get to that oil in the Middle East to save you. It just wasn't there, and they kept blowing up the pipe lines anyway. Nasty terrorists. Nasty foreigners making you starve."

So I will answer my own question. No we aren't ever going to stop talking about peak oil. All peak oil, all the time. Bush's puppeteers are placing the topic on the table, and they aren't going to take it away. It may be the last words we hear ringing in our ears.

The "we" in my question, "Can we stop talking about peak oil now?" referred to those who may care that we are at perpetual war, that our freedoms are gone, and that genocide is being conducted. I was referring to those who may still want to continue pushing for full understanding of what the hell happened on 9/11.

I am not going to be tricked into worrying about losing my skin and shirt over this peak oil scam. Instead I want to see what is going on behind this curtain.

Ruppert is using this peak oil thing as a wedge he says, because he figures we are all too stupid to understand that some people are so evil that they would slaughter their own. Perhaps he is right. Most of us have no empathy, the reasoning may go, and are racist bastards, so we have to be really scared about our own impending mortality before we will wake up. Perhaps he is right.

But those aren't the kind of people I would want on my side.

We aren't going to see some alternative energy device come and save us. Psychopathy is the corporate model, so don't look for salvation from all those people making a hell of a living from war. We have fascists in power here in the US. They are not advocates of life, as they have so eagerly demonstrated.

Who benefits when we turn our gaze away from the truth of who these people are, and start worrying about peak oil?

So, maybe we do need to keep talking about peak oil. Just exactly why is it being sold to us?

Cathles and his team estimate that in a study area of about 9,600 square miles off the coast of Louisiana, source rocks a dozen kilometers down have generated as much as 184 billion tons of oil and gas " about 1,000 billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent. "That's 30 percent more than we humans have consumed over the entire petroleum era," Cathles says. "And that's just this one little postage stamp area; if this is going on worldwide, then there's a lot of hydrocarbons venting out."

Jon doubts much will come of this discovery, and I agree with him. The point I wanted to add to his thoughtful discussion is that this discovery sounds like another nail in the coffin of the Peak Oil debate.

For what ever reason, Ruppert has detoured his research into the 9/11 terrorist act and segued into the Peak Oil dead end. He has effectively taken the heat off the real perpetrators, and has taken a path that will go no where.

Whether out of naivete or something more sinister, I would not want to say.

Saturday, March 05, 2005

The Sliding Scale of Paranoia Part 3

I will continue with the high end of the scale.

One of the more dangerous tasks on earth is to effectively demonstrate to humanity that there are other options, other means of engaging with the universe, other perspectives on reality. If you do so in an engaging, energetic, intelligent manner, and demonstrate that non-violence is an option for change then you are in big trouble.

Martin Luther King, Jr is an example of such a creator of new worlds. He demonstrated to a troubled segment of the population that they did not have to view themselves as they were told, that they have rights as human beings, and the most effective manner to create change was through non-violent creative action.

There is little that is more threatening to the Control Structure then people growing in awareness and taking creative action based on that awareness. To do so non-violently, in an honest straight forward manner is the worst. If you are engaged in such an activity set the scale on high and never lower it.

Control thrives on violence, it cannot have people becoming creative individuals with the realization that they can stand up for themselves and a principle and allow the universe to reform around them.

Such threats have to be eliminated for the control structure to remain in place. The Control Structure is based on a rather flimsy pretext: That you will remain an idiot sheep for the rest of your life, and insist that anyone within your sphere of influence does the same. A lot of people make good money creating distractions or reinforcing the status quo to help you remain in the herd, contently chewing cud until it is abattoir time.

I am not going into details about the assassination. I will just state that it was probably not just another crazed gunman acting alone. Some good links can be found here.

Every once in a while some academic writes a book about conspiracy. He will state something like, "In times of uncertainty, the populace will turn to conspiracy in attempt to make sense of an uncertain world."

Duh. But, when he says it, it sounds like a pathology.

The book will then proceed to examine a few conspiracies that are a bit off the wall, to put it kindly, such as the one that there were no moon landings, and everything was faked.

It's a mean trick academic-man is playing, and you are supposed to believe that all conspiracy theories are created equal. No one would say all scientific theories are created equal, why would anyone believe that about conspiracy theories? Only those who want to believe that god is in heaven and all is right in the world.

Such an academic is not actually disputing conspiracy theory. It only superficially appears that way. The mass media talk about conspiracies every day. Some cable channels devote 24 hours a day to looney conspiracy theories.

A guy in a remote cave is directing a world wide network of conspirators, and was able to demolish some of the heaviest guarded buildings in the world, violating the heaviest guarded air space in the world. It is okay to believe in that conspiracy.

A world wide network of communists were attempting to take over the world, and infect every human being with their godless anti-capitalist theology. It is okay to believe in that conspiracy.

What such an academic is trying to convince you is that you shouldn't trouble yourself with thinking for yourself; just put all your faith and trust in those arbitrators of reality - the mass media.

"Its okay, you don't have to think," he soothes, "join me in mocking those who think that people may act out of their own self interest and conspire to alter reality for their personal benefit rather than your own. Trust power. Trust authority. I do, and look how I turned out," he emotes while stroking his chin beard on C-Span.

I wonder if he can really be so juvenile in his thinking? This supposedly learned individual wants us to believe, with all our heart, that once people gain power they become honest and trustworthy? He wants us to believe that the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc., despite bus loads of evidence, always have our best interests at heart, and would never conspire against anyone?

Well, they do conspire, he may admit, but only against the bad guys.

Who determines the bad guys? Those in power decide who the bad guys are. The bad guys are anyone who stands in their way. The mass media report back to us what they are told to report.

You can't get out of saying there are no conspiracies. It is the only reality here on earth. Of course, an unbalanced individual can take that too far. Every once in a while, a plane crash is just a plane crash.

His work is damage control. The worst thing that could happen to the Control Structure is for the American public to wake up and understand the why behind the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, Wellstone, etc. We continue to pull the trigger by ignoring reality.

I have been talking about paranoia in this series. It was a bit of a trick. What I am really talking about is just a basic awareness of how reality works.

Academic-man is telling us to put our faith in the status quo power structure.

To which I respond, "Et tu, Brute?"

Cold war scholar Richard Dolan discusses our national security state with intelligence and great insight. I will discuss his work in later posts, but for now I will just quote the below:

The most noteworthy feature of the American national security state during the late 1960s was its covert pervasiveness throughout American society. First, Hoover's FBI. In 1968, the bureau initiated a COINTEL program [...]

Next to the bureau, the military intelligence services became the most important component of the domestic intelligence scene. Army intelligence had nearly unlimited funds, extensive manpower, specialized personnel, deep planning and training resources, and the most sophisticated communications and data processing capability. [...] The army's intelligence surveillance did not focus on tactical and reconnaissance data, but on political and ideological intelligence within the United States. (This was wholly illegal.) [...]

Then there was the CIA. By the late 1960s, there were more spies than diplomats in the State Department, or employees in the Department of Labor. [...] When the Weather Underground, a radical splinter of the SDS, had an "acid test" to detect agents provocateurs, they had no idea that the CIA had been tripping on LSD throughout the 1950s, creating a special caste of "enlightened agents" for precisely these occasions. [Based on this, we wonder about "agents provocateur" in the New Age and UFO community who are "specially trained?"]

The agency continued its work on mind control. Following the work of Dr. Jose Delgado [experiments in] Electrical Stimulation of the Brain [were conducted.] This involves implanting electrodes into the brain and body, with the result that the subject's memory, impulses, and feelings could all be controlled. Moreover, ESB could evoke hallucinations, as well as fear and pleasure. "It could literally manipulate the human will at will," [said Dr. Rober Keefe, a neurosurgeon at Tulane University.]

In 1968, George Estabrooks, another spook scientist, spoke indiscreetly to a reporter for the Providence Evening Bulletin. "The key to creating an effective spy or assassin, rests in creating a multiple personality with the aid of hypnosis," a procedure which he described as "child's play."

By early 1969, teams within the CIA were running a number of bizarre experiments in mind control under the name Operation Often. In addition to the normal assortment of chemists, biologists, and conventional scientists, the operation employed psychics and experts in demonology.

Over at the NSA, all one can say with certainty is that its budget dwarfed all others within the intelligence community. ...

I listen to the small talk when I am out and about, in the streets. People talk with pride about what college their kids will be attending. They talk about television, concerts, movies, whatever bullshit happens to cross their mind.

Businesses make one, five and ten year plans. They change their IRA administrators. Restaurants and apartment complexes are built. Telemarketers still call.